gabardine: [16] The use of gabardine for a sort of worsted material is an early 20th-century development, but the word itself has been around much longer than that. Its central meaning (for which the usual spelling is gaberdine) is ‘long coarse outer garment’. English acquired it from Old French gauvardine, which was a development of an earlier gallevardine. This was probably derived from Middle High German wallevart ‘pilgrimage’ (a compound formed from wallen ‘roam’ and vart ‘journey, way’), and hence etymologically meant ‘pilgrim’s garment’.[gabardine etymology, gabardine origin, 英语词源]

gable: [14] The notion underlying gable is probably of ‘topping’ or ‘surmounting’, for it has been traced back by some to prehistoric Indo-European *ghebhalā, which also produced Greek kephalé ‘head’. Its immediate source was Old Norse gafl, which gave English the form gavel, subsequently remodelled on the basis of Old French gable (itself probably borrowed originally from the Old Norse word).=> cephalic

gadget: [19] Gadget is an elusive sort of word, as vague in its history as it is unspecific in its meaning. It seems to have originated as a piece of sailors’ slang, and is said to have been current as long ago as the 1850s, but the earliest record of it in print is from 1886, in R Brown’s Spun Yarn and Spindrift: ‘Then the names of all the other things on board a ship! I don’t know half of them yet; even the sailors forget at times, and if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their memory, they call it a chickenfixing, or a gadjet, or a gill-guy, or a timmeynoggy, or a wim-wom – just pro tem., you know’.

As for its source, suggestions have included French gâchette ‘catch of a mechanism’ and French dialect gagée ‘tool’.

gag: [15] Middle English gaggen meant ‘strangle, suffocate’, so the word started out with strong connotations that seem to have become submerged in local dialects as it came to be used more commonly in the milder sense ‘obstruct someone’s mouth’. In the 20th century, however, they have re-emerged in the intransitive sense ‘choke’. It is not clear how the 19th-century noun sense ‘joke’ is connected, if at all. As for the word’s source, it is generally said to have originated as an imitation of someone retching or choking.

gain: [15] Gain is Germanic in origin, although English acquired it via Old French. Its distant ancestor is the Germanic noun *waithā. The etymological meaning of this was ‘hunting ground’ (it came ultimately from a prehistoric Indo-European base *wei-, which also produced Lithuanian vyti ‘pursue, hunt’ and Sanskrit veti, vayati ‘seeks, follows’), but gradually this extended via ‘place where food or fodder is sought’ to ‘grazing place’ (its modern German and Dutch descendant weide means ‘pasture’).

From it was formed a verb *waithanjan ‘hunt’ and ‘graze, pasture’, which Vulgar Latin took over as *gwadanjāre. This preserved the semantic dichotomy that had grown up in Germanic: the agricultural sense developed to ‘cultivate land’, and it appears that the ‘hunting’ sense gave rise metaphorically to ‘win, earn’. Both passed into Old French gaaigner, but evidently by the time English acquired the word, the former meaning had all but died out (although it is interesting to note that it was introduced into English as a pseudo-archaism in the 17th and 18th centuries: ‘Of old to gain land was as much as to till and manure it’, Termes de la ley 1708).

gaiter: [18] Etymologically as well as semantically, gaiter is an ‘ankle covering’. It comes from French guêtre ‘gaiter’, which may well have been formed from Germanic *wirst-. This denoted ‘twist, turn’, and it has several modern derivatives which mean essentially ‘twisting joint’: German rist, for example, which has now migrated anatomically to the ‘instep’ and the ‘back of the hand’, originally signified ‘ankle, wrist’, and although English wrist now refers only to the hand/arm joint, it was formerly used dialectally for the ‘ankle’.=> wrist

gala: [17] Gala comes ultimately from Arabic khil’a, which denoted an ‘especially fine garment given as a presentation’. This original meaning persisted through Spanish gala and into Italian and French gala, from one or other of which English got it (‘Whereupon this King and the whole Court put on Galas [special festive attire]’, Cabala sive scrinia sacra 1654) and survived into the 19th century (‘Apparelled on Sunday morning in gala, as if for the drawingroom, he constantly marched out all his household to the parish church’, George Bancroft, History of the United States 1876).

Nowadays, however, all that remains is the extended sense ‘festive occasion’, first recorded in the late 18th century.

galaxy: [14] The Greeks had a word for the ‘Milky Way’ – and indeed it was very much the same as ours. They called it galaxías, which was originally an adjective, ‘milky’, derived from the noun gála ‘milk’. English acquired it via late Latin galaxiās and Old French galuxie. (The term Milky Way, incidentally, which originated as a translation of Latin via lactea, is of roughly equal antiquity in English with galaxy. Their common inspiration is the white appearance of the myriad stars packed densely together.)

gale: [16] Gale is a puzzling word. An isolated early example of what appears to be the word, in the phrase gale wind (‘Our life like smoke or chaff is carried away as with a gale wind’, Zachary Boyd, The Last Battle 1619), suggests that it may originally have been an adjective. If this is so, a possible candidate as a source may be Norwegian galen ‘bad’ – making gale etymologically a ‘bad wind’. The Norwegian adjective in turn may go back to Old Norse galinn ‘bewitched, enchanted’, a derivative of galo ‘sing, bewitch, enchant’ (source of English yell and related to the final syllable of nightingale).=> nightingale, yell

gall: Gall ‘bile’ [12], and by metaphorical extension ‘bitterness’ and ‘effrontery’, was borrowed from Old Norse gall. It gets its name ultimately from its colour, for its prehistoric Germanic ancestor *gallam or *gallon (which also produced German galle and Dutch gal) goes back to Indo-European *ghol-, *ghel-, which also gave English gold, jaundice, yellow, and yolk.

The relationship of the two other English words gall (‘skin sore’ [14], whence the verbal use ‘exasperate’, and ‘plant swelling’ [14]) to gall ‘bile’ and to each other is not clear. The immediate source of ‘skin sore’ was Middle Low German galle ‘sore’, but ‘bile’ could easily have led via ‘astringent substance’ to ‘sore place’, and it may be that ultimately the Middle Low German word is connected with gall ‘bile’. Gall ‘plant swelling’ has been traced back via Old French galle to Latin galla ‘plant gall’, but some later descendants of this were used for ‘swelling on an animal’s leg’, further adding to the confusion.=> gold, jaundice, yellow, yolk

gallant: [14] Gallant originated as the present participle of Old French galer ‘make merry, rejoice’. This probably came from Gallo- Romance *walāre, a derivative of Frankish *wala ‘well’ (of which English well is a relative). Following its French model, the English adjective originally meant ‘showy, splendid, gorgeous’ as well as ‘spirited, brave’ and ‘courteous, polished’ (the last of which led in the 17th century to ‘courteously attentive to women’ and ‘amorous’). Regale [17] too goes back to Old French galer.=> regale, well

gallery: [15] The original meaning of gallery in English was ‘long roofed walk way along the wall of a building’; the present sense ‘room or building for the exhibition of paintings, sculpture, etc’ did not develop until the end of the 16th century. English borrowed the word from Old French galerie ‘portico’, which came via Italian galleria from medieval Latin galeria. This may have been an alteration of galilea (source of English galilee [16], as in galilee chapel), thought to have been applied to a porch or chapel at the far or western end of a church in allusion to the position of Galilee as the province of Palestine most distant from Jerusalem.

gallon: [13] English acquired gallon from Old Northern French galon. This was a descendant of medieval Latin gallēta, a word for a ‘jug’ which was also used as a unit of measurement for wine. It may have been of Celtic origin. An early modern English dialect form of gallon was gawn, which added to tree produced gantry [16], originally a ‘wooden stand for barrels’.=> gantry

gallows: [13] Gallows was probably borrowed from Old Norse gálgi (the related Old English galga does not seem to have survived into the Middle English period). Both go back to a prehistoric Germanic *galgon ‘pole’, whose descendants, which also include Old High German galgo and Gothic galga, were often used for the ‘cross on which Christ was crucified’. The plurality of modern English gallows presumably comes from the fact that technically a gallows consists of two upright poles with a cross-piece in between (as opposed to a gibbet, which has a single upright).

galoshes: [14] In modern terms, galoshes might be etymologically rendered as ‘little French shoes’. The word comes from Old French galoche, which was an alteration of late Latin gallicula. This in turn was a diminutive form of Latin gallica, short for gallica solea ‘Gallic sandal, sandal from Gaul’ (the name Gaul, incidentally, and the Latin-based Gallic [17], come ultimately from prehistoric Germanic *walkhoz ‘foreigners’, which is related also to Walloon, walnut, and Welsh). The term galosh was originally used in English for a sort of clog; the modern sense ‘overshoe’ did not develop until the early 19th century.=> gallic, walloon, walnut, welsh

galvanize: [19] The verb galvanize commemorates the work of Italian physicist Luigi Galvani (1737–98), who in 1762 discovered voltaic electricity by attaching the legs of dead frogs to pairs of different metals. It was first used literally, for the production of muscular spasms by electrical means (Sydney Smith in 1825: ‘Galvanize a frog, don’t galvanize a tiger’), but by the mid-19th century it was being employed figuratively, for ‘stimulate, spur’. The sense ‘coat electrolytically with metal’, dates from the 1830s.

gambit: [17] Like gambol [16], gambit originated in an Italian noun meaning literally ‘tripping up’. The Italian for ‘leg’ is gamba (a relative of English gammon ‘bacon’). From it were derived gambetto and gambata, both of which signified ‘trip-up’. The former was borrowed into Spanish as gambito, where its underlying notion of ‘underhanded procedure’ was first applied specifically to a chess manoeuvre in the mid- 16th century.

It passed into English mainly via French gambit. More frivolous, light-hearted aspects of ‘tripping’ are preserved in gambata, which English originally took over via French as gambade and gradually transformed into gambol.=> gambol, gammon